Thanks clubman. Your right.
We are quite good overall. Both in early 30's. Two small kids. Both professionals with combined income of 110k (although wife is on maternity leave at the mo) After paying for holiday and clearing car loans its whats left over from the SSIA's.
Its really savings for the future. Its not money that we will need in the next 5-7 years.
Our options are:
1. Put it off the mortgage (still owe approx 50% of cost)
2. Put it into shares (was thinking of a tracked fund rather than individual shares)
3. Keep it in the bank for the duration, switching it about between high interest accounts.
4. Buy overseas investment property (Hungary or Poland possibly).
The more i look at some of these the more confused I get!!!!
My only gripe with the celtic tiger is that we missed a lot of the early stuff because of our age and jobs at the start. e.g got on the ladder 4 years ago when property had already risen quite high and also only really started earning good salarys in the last 3-4 years (4 years ago our combined income was 70k). We now are concerned that we are behind the pack again in using our savings.
We now feel very fortunate to be in this position but are not really sure how to maximise the use of something that we have saved quite hard to build up. We were hoping to get an idea of what other people in the same situation have done or are doing with their savings.